Chris

Interesting, thanks very much for the insight.

Many news sites reported on that Kickstarter update. By "leak" they meant from backer forums to public, not from DF internal to public. It would have been fine in theory except many of the reports were based on just a small bit of pasted text, and drastically misinterpreted DF's actual plans and current state. Many of the reports were of course also fine, but the ones that went up really fast are (unsurprisingly) the ones with the least fully contextualized information (since full context would have required watching the accompanying episode that actually made up the bulk of the update) so an internet controversy erupted.

Alternatively: "Wait, video games? Aren't those for babies?"

...or a byproduct of translation, or some combination of the three. I enjoyed The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle as the first thing I read by Murakami, but then I tried to read 1Q84 and found it just infuriating. I really have no idea if the character of the prose that put me off is intentional, or due to translation, or what, but reading hundreds and hundreds of pages in that stilted, affected style was too much for me and I stopped halfway through.

2 Player Productions uses a feature Vimeo offers to only make videos playable on certain whitelisted sites—in our case, Kickstarter.com and doublefine.com. We do this because documentary videos are an exclusive backer reward. Unfortunately it occasionally also causes weird problems that we have been unable to effectively troubleshoot except to suggest people try using a different browser temporarily, which seems to have worked for the vast majority of users (as long as they don't use adblock etc.). Beyond that there's not much we can do. Whether it's the correct solution to make them private or not is a matter of debate at this point, but we already made the promise during the Kickstarter campaign and we feel we'd be messing with backer expectation to go back on it—obviously not all backers would be bothered, but our sense of the community is that enough of them would.

What the hell is this about?!

Hahaha, cheers.

I disagree with the fundamental argument of that comic strip. Obviously we understand that no two human creations are literally the same at an atomic level. But I think probably most of us also understand that there's some kind of threshold, even if not super rigid and defined, of interesting and meaningful—not simply technical—differentiation. It's pretty clear that there are things that maintain interesting, describable, and profound differences even when we aren't forced to observe them while trapped in a box for a year. We won't all care to explore those differences in all those things, because yes it's true that we simply don't all have the time or interest to become deeply educated about the same things. But I do think there are things that, in general, are compared for their own sake or for some purely utilitarian reasons, and then things that, when compared, are more likely to yield disproportionately meaningful rewards. This is one of the important functions of criticism.

Something I think is more important than the physics simulation unto itself is the ability to return an object back to its proper place—even if, when you first picked it up, it was not yet in its proper place. This allows (although does not force) the player to treat the environment as an actual home, and not simply a physics sandbox, which is a really important quality that many larger-budget games make no attempt to facilitate mechanically.

I figured this would be because that website simply didn't have an appropriate category, but then I looked, and they do actually have "Adventure > First Person > Modern". !??!

There's nothing novels about novels anymore either.

I think the problem is actually that working on the crazily ambitious project is the tempting option, because when it exists only as a fantasy it is alluring and important and grand in scope. I suspect it became an overwhelming and unsustainable development, and at a certain point it was clear that it wasn't actually likely to release in any form that resembled the initial intention.

You can include instances of brutality and immorality without the work itself implicitly endorsing it, even in a thrilling context. It need not be didactically condemning and scolding. But surely it is more interesting and effective and honorable to make some kind of attempt to interrogate its implications rather than, generally, lazily but overwhelmingly endorse just one particular outcome, especially when the subject matter is so relevant to matters of considerable importance in our society.

Oh okay. Yeah, Zynga games in particular have all this OTHER stuff that Hexagon doesn't, like microtransaction sinkholes and the like, that is a gross thing that is totally its own. In the case of something like Hexagon, I mean, it IS intended to be absorbing to the point that it is just played for an ideally-as-long-as-possible-amount-of-time. That's not something specific to Hexagon or anything, it's just inherent to the entire genre of game based around an addictive endlessly repeating mechanic. I've already gone through that with multiple other games, like Tetris and Meteos, and I strongly feel I don't need that to happen anymore, even if I had extraordinarily enjoyable experiences with those games. Also, for me in particular, I felt like I hit a skill wall in Hexagon, not because of any inherent flaw in the game, but just because I did, for whatever combination of reasons.

Did I actually say that Zynga stuff though, in that phrasing? Because it doesn't sound like an opinion I actually hold. I probably said (or meant to say) that I had hit some kind of personal wall past which it didn't feel like I was getting any more out of it, rather than assigning some kind of negative judgment about the game unto itself. Maybe I'm just remembering wrong, but it doesn't sound like an opinion I would have had about that game, at least not in the way your post reads to me now.

What did I specifically say about this? It doesn't ring a bell.

My interpretation of that stuff varies a lot across a spectrum, though. The things I don't tend to like are the ones at the two extremes of: 1) just trying too goddamn hard to make something sUpEr WaCkY or FUCKED UP AND EXTREME or whatever—this is why I'm suspicious of Saints Row, but I'll still give it a shot—and 2) games that are entirely self-serious but are utterly sabotaged by unthoughtful inclusion of cliche video game tropes that just break the whole thing. (GTA is actually kind of an example of the second thing, but I still like it because when it's good, it's SO good, so of course there are always exceptions to every rule, and since I'm a human being I'm subject to arbitrary quirks of judgment.) GENERALLY SPEAKING (again this is all subject to the whims of circumstance), the kinds of games that appeal to me most are the ones that for the most part either take themselves seriously on a relatively basic level, and they can avoid "breaking" by being either really mechanically stripped down (Gone Home, Journey, Ico, etc.), or by just by deploying potentially-crazy mechanics that still actually speak to the larger themes of the game (Far Cry 2, Cart Life, Crusader Kings II, Civilization, Thief, etc.). That latter category can still include really complex or layered mechanics like CK2 or Cart Life, if they actually feel coherent to the experience, or total bonkers video game bullshit, like Far Cry 2, but usually those moments are remarkable and player-driven and in an ideal world will still speak to what the game is about. Anyway I obviously don't actually evaluate games by, like, checking this shit off on a checklist. They're just some patterns I can sort of loosely identify in a lot of the games I like. But there are also games that just don't have anything to do with this at all, really, because they only pay lip service to being in a coherent world in the first place, and they're mainly about the mechanics unto themselves, and so then you just kind of hope for some nice aesthetic cohesion of some kind (Tetris, Super Mario Galaxy, a nicely-made crossword app, Canabalt, etc.). GAMES

WHAT. BEST.

I'm good friends with her, but I don't think she really knows Steve or the rest of the Fullbright people. (I'm not a thousand percent sure of that but I was never aware of her hanging out with Steve in Boston, and she's never lived in the same place with any of the Fullbright people at any other point as far as I'm aware.) I'm good friends with her but my contribution wasn't even mentioned in her review and I doubt it was much of a factor. I think her personal life experience makes her a really excellent choice to review this game and it would be a bummer if a pretty tangential personal connection invalidated that. Of course others may disagree.

Hey new people!

If you think I'm a shitty video game hipster, that's fine I guess, I can't really bother thinking about it though. I'm long past the point of caring to analyze whether the games I enjoy or don't enjoy playing can be put into some kind of definable or useful category. I spent a couple years worrying about that when I was the editor of a video game website and it's pointlessly stressful and enjoyment-inhibiting. One of the great pleasures for me of doing Idle Thumbs at this point is just playing the weird shit I think is interesting and fun and cool, and if that's limiting in some way to our audience size or whatever, well okay. There seem to be a bunch of people who enjoy listening to our conversations about those things, which is pretty lucky and gratifying. It's true, I'm not really into big bombastic entertainment experiences, at least not most of the time. Oh well. I'm not doing that on purpose to be spiteful or something, so I'm sorry it frustrates people for whatever reason. I can't speak for anyone else. I don't have much more to say about it.

That's an interesting response, Nels. I disagree in a lot of fundamental ways I think—I think the notion of explaining why characters are flawed is a bit of an entertainment cliche that doesn't really map to how we actually experience the world most of the time. Most people don't thoroughly psychoanalyze themselves or their friends, or at least not in a way that really does justice to that person's true lived experience, and since this novel is explicitly told from the perspective of one of its (flawed) characters, that didn't seem like an omission to me.

Well, there are basically infinite games to play; I already don't have enough time to play everything I want to. You have to have SOME method to filter stuff out. "This looks tonally unappealing" seems as good a way as any. I don't really enjoy parody-style humor and over the top wackiness (except in conversation I guess) generally, so when Danielle frames a lot of the game in that way, it just doesn't get me excited enough to want to go out and devote a bunch of time, especially since I know these games are big open world affairs that will take some time to really explore. It's totally fine that she's super into the game, and I think she explained well why it was appealing to her, those traits just didn't really sound like my thing.

Haha, do you mean in terms of the timbre of their voices, or in terms of the content of their discourse?

Thanks! It's interesting how your initial conflicts seem to have so heavily shadowed your reading throughout. I don't mind the meandering nature; it feels like kind of the point of the thing, and definitely seems to be a common enough factor in literary representation of this period that I feel it must be speaking to something true (or at least something true for a significant number of people at the time).